Richard Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is a fully grown 28-year-old adult best known for playing Fortnite and making more money in a day than any of us will make in our lifetimes. He has, at some point in his life, eaten a sandwich. I’m not sure if he’s ever made one for himself, however.
Blevins recently appeared on an episode of Back to Back Chef, a show on the Bon Apetit YouTube channel. Back to Back Chef is a show starring food director and Chef Carla Lalli Music where she helps celebrities cook using only vocal instructions. It’s a silly show that’s featured guests like Elizabeth Olsen, Al Roker, and Hailee Steinfeld. It’s usually a bit of a mess—cooking through verbal direction is admittedly difficult—but all Blevins had to do was make a fucking sandwich. He technically did!
Music was teaching Blevins how to make an “egg-in-a-hole” bacon-and-cheese sandwich. To make one, all you need to do is cut two slices of bread, cut a hole in the middle, drop the egg, fry it in a pan, flip after maybe 2-3 minutes, and then toss some bacon and cheese in there. I’m not trying to sound like an arsehole when I say that it is not a complicated process. Yeah, it’s intimidating to flip an egg, and I sympathise with Blevins to an extent. He’s not a cook, and he’s cooking on the spot. That said, he seems to have some trouble with things like slicing bread and fruit.
Here we see Blevins, who I stress has lived on this planet for nearly three decades, cutting off the ends of a loaf of bread—not a baguette, or a roll, or another type of bread you might reasonably make a hoagie from—and then slicing length-wise in order to produce the two pieces of bread for his sandwich. In his defence, he’s assuming this is a fancy sandwich. He’s in the kitchen with a professional chef, and I get that might lead to some overthinking. But also, again, it’s a sandwich. It is one of the most ubiquitous foodstuffs in the world. I don’t know what else to say. It’s a sandwich? It’s a sandwich. Two pieces of bread and stuff in the middle. You know, a sandwich. I don’t know what is happening here, but I do know that I find it very upsetting.
Still, you can make a sandwich with bread cut this way, and so Blevin continues after cutting his slices and trimming the crust in order to make a sort of bread-sponge. Fair enough. To add a little texture to the sandwich, Music adds an avocado to the recipe. This causes some degree of worry for Blevins, who admits to having never cut an avocado by himself. I get it. Not everyone cooks with avocados and that’s because sometimes they’re just mushy fuck fruit that people add to mac and cheese for no discernible reason. (This is true! I’ve seen people do this! It’s a sin!) That said, Music’s instructions are pretty good. Take your knife, find the side of the fruit, cut in until you touch the pit. The idea is to cut deep enough and then cut around the pit for easy removal. “You can’t cut right through it,” Music says. Blevins cuts right through it.
In the above picture, you can see the monstrous creature being birthed. There’s one part of a bread piece that’s mysteriously gone, and the avocado’s been chopped into some type of avant-garde art piece. But he persists and pushes on through! The rest goes pretty well, since all that needs to be done is dropping an egg into the bread and cooking it for a bit. Drop, flip, add your fillings. Blevins does this and the result is something that I will call a sandwich in spite of its horrifying appearance. This is the final product:
Again, I am trying to be kind, but look at his face. Dude knows. It’s hard to publicly do something that you’ve never really done before. Blevins took a risk, knowing that the final product would be subject to scrutiny. That said: It’s a sandwich. It’s a sandwich? It’s a sandwich. Blevins is a man who believes that kicking an NFL field goal is easy—after all, you just need to kick the ball—but who also carved a piece of bread like he was a torturer in a Tarantino movie. Look how he massacred my boy! I congratulate him for being a good sport, but wow, I would absolutely not eat that sandwich. And I would not trust this dude with anything sharp.
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